Making my own framework and using it as an upstream for projects

Question

I’m a freelancer making websites for clients. I have my own devstack based on React and Node. Currently, when I’m developing a new site, I just copy the last project that I’ve programmed and modify routes, pages and so on. When I add some new functionality (update webpack 1 to 2 and so on), I then have to do it manually at each project (or I don’t do it at all).

I’d like to have a more professional approach to this. Can you recommend me some materials or attitudes towards it?

My current goal is this: Have a repo (private github and after verification give it public) with my devstack (framework). Everytime I start a new project, I fork it (so that it stays as upstream origin) and start developing. Everytime I change some core functionality or add something that I want to have in other projects too, I want to push it somehow to the devstack repo. I could also copy this code to the devstack manually, but I don’t want to write it twice, so a better approach would help.

How can I do that, is my idea good? Basically, some recommendation if it makes sence at all and some link to an article would help me enough. Thank you.

Answer 1

"Everytime I change some core functionality or add something that I want to have in other projects too, I want to push it somehow to the devstack repo."

Pushing to a devstack repo (the original one you have forked for all your project) is a good first step, but it won't magically "propagate" that new feature to all your other repos.

However, you can take advantage of the triangular workflow:

• fork (see "Fork a Repo") the repo devstack (that is what you are doing already for your projects)

• clone that fork locally for a given project,

  git clone /url/my/fork myfork
  

• add as remote upstream the original repo

  cd myfork
  git remote add upstream /url/to/devstack
  

From there, with git 2.9 or more, configure:

git config --global pull.rebase true
git config --global rebase.autoStash true

Finally, each time you want to update one of your repo to benefit from a feature pushed to devstack:

cd /path/to/one/of/mine/projects
git checkout mybranch
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/master